Psychologising development: Durganand Sinha, the crisis of community development, and the modernisation of the rural mindset in India, c. 1950-1970

This paper analyses how psychological frameworks and methods shaped rural development in India after independence in 1947. In the context of the Community Development Programme and its growing criticism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, psychologists claimed to offer a vital contribution to define, understand, and alter the mindset of people outside the cities. Because hopes for comprehensive social and mental reform remained unfulfilled, psychologists around Durganand Sinha introduced their expertise into rural planning. This reflected an international trend facilitated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and UNESCO to grant the social sciences a more prominent role in rural development.
The paper makes three arguments: the evolution of rural developmentalism was not (only) driven by international organisations but centrally by local intellectual circles and their institutional and personal interests; engineering the rural mindset was an important, but so far unacknowledged, step towards the ‘indigenisation’ of psychology in India since the 1970s; and the role of psychology in rural development is an opportunity to understand better how the social sciences acquired their important role in state policies in the global south after 1945 beyond models of intellectual diffusionism.